Organizations such as credit card companies, utilities and the like, are faced with the problem of efficiently processing large volumes of incoming mail that they receive. For example, in a single business day, a utility or credit card company may receive tens of thousands of envelopes, many of which will each contain a remittance advice and a cheque in payment of a customer's account. Other correspondence and so-called "junk" mail will of course also be received. Accordingly, provision must be made to efficiently open all of the envelopes, check and verify the contents of those envelopes, and deal with the contents in an appropriate fashion. From a financial viewpoint, cheques and other remittances should be identified, verified and passed on within the organization, so that the payment can be credited through the banking system as quickly as possible. Delays in processing remittances can lead to substantial losses in terms of bank interest that would otherwise be generated.
Various attempts have been made to automate the mail handling process. For example, applicant's own U.S. Pat. No. 3,301,116 issued Jan. 31, 1967 discloses a mail processor which is commercially available under the trade mark TRI-CUT. Incoming envelopes are delivered to the TRI-CUT machine in stacks and the machine individually transports successive envelopes from the stack and opens each envelope along one longitudinal edge (the top edge) and each of the two side edges, leaving front and rear panels of the envelope joined along the other longitudinal edge. The two panels can then be readily separated and the contents extracted.
U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,625,497 and 5,131,545 issued respectively on Dec. 2, 1986 and Jul. 21, 1992 disclose machines for automatically extracting the contents of envelopes. While these machines have been found to satisfactorily and efficiently extract the contents of envelopes, the envelopes are handled in batches and the contents are collected in batches; as such, the contents must then be further processed individually in order to verify and appropriately deal each item. Also, it is occasionally necessary to identify the envelope from which a particular set of contents was extracted, and this can be difficult with a batch-type operation.
Accordingly, an object of the present invention is to provide a method and apparatus in which the envelopes can be handled individually and which makes provision for the contents of each envelope to be extracted, verified at least on a preliminary basis, and passed on for further processing.